A flying dungeon for 1PD 2013

My entry in the one page dungeon contest 2013 was inspired by Archigram's Instant City.  

Their idea was that this airship descends on a hum drum little town and they have a party, and then the airship takes off, leaving behind a taste for miniskirts and high technology.

If you're ever like, "I need to come up with a Space Mutant D&D adventure and I'm looking for inspiration  but I don't have time to watch a whole episode of Thundarr the Barbarian" then spend 5 minutes at the Archigram Archive.  Guaranteed.

Any way...

Here's IRON CLOUD.

My goal was to carefully plan an adventure that has all of the glorious stupidity and potential for hijinks that something that I pull out of my butt while the players are rolling characters would.

Session Log

I want to organize a bit the game I'm running.  It's not that I forget things from one session to the next, but I'm accumulating a mess of notes.  I've never been interested in this kind of bookkeeping but the idea of having one piece of paper from one session to the next to keep track of things sounds like a good idea.

So I put together this log and filled it out for last session:

Here's the file:

Session Log Excel
Session Log pdf

Wisdom

"Knowledge is realizing that the street is one way; wisdom is looking in both directions anyway."

-pillar of the old school gaming community: Albert Einstein

Clearly a character's Wisdom modifier should apply to all saving throws. That's how Mr. Einstein and I run anyway.

Centipedes & Spiders

Centipedes and Spiders are from the Fey Realm, but were long ago banished to the Underworld. Most of the Centipedes and Spiders, while larger than in the World We Know, are still merely beasts. There are some of these creatures who are ancient, and these have grown huge over the countless years since they were cast into the Shadow Realm and their intelect has grown with their size.

The many-legged centipedes accepted their place in the Shadow Realm and sometimes even sell whatever information they can gather about the Lords of the Underworld and the Court of the Black Citadel to the highest bidder, which is often the Kings and Queens of the Fey.

The centipedes eight legged cousins, however, have not forgotten their banishment from the shadows of the Green Realm and they hate all fey creatures with an unquenchable seething and malicious passion.

Giant Rats

The giant rats were once the favored pets and messengers of the God of the Underworld. They have been replaced by the crows in this respect and have been banished to the edges of the Dark Sea.
These rats possess a keen animal inteligence and are capable of mimicing speech. They were once able to swim short distances in the sea of the dead, and to facilitate their movement from island to island ancient stones were errected. Many of these stones are still in place.

The Black Lodge of Elemental Evil, etc.

I, like a few other people, just bought some old D&D stuff.  I got the Keep on the Borderlands (which I'm now running) and the Village of Hommlet.  I never played through these some I'm coming at them fresh. I'm not going to review or discuss these right now really except to say that when I read about the Temple of Elemental Evil in VoH more than anything it made me think of this place:

When I run this I think I'll associate each of the NPCs in the village with someone from Twin Peaks.  Of course the Inn of the Welcome Wench will serve cherry pie and damn fine coffee.

This is pretty much how most players act, right?

On another note:

Friar Dave recently asked the question, "with cheap and legal PDFs of B/X D&D, do we still need Labyrinth Lord?"  This has gotten me thinking about how there is a retroclone product that I wish existed but doesn't really.  What I want is a pdf primer/player's guide to Fantasy gaming that I can print several copies of and give away to players.  It would have:

• A low page count, probably 24 pages at most.  I want it to cost a buck fifty or less to print. 
• Not a lot of art, but some art for atmosphere.  Probably line art so as not to bleed through cheap stock paper.
• A brief explanation of what the game is and how to play.
• Have rules for character generation, the first few levels of spells and some simple adventuring rules like time and movement, light, maybe hirelings.
• Editable forms, so the DM can modify to describe the rules of whichever particular edition or version of the game they are running.  This one is the trickiest I think, but many of the different versions of the game are similar enough that I think you could do it and cover most of them.
• A character sheet on the back.

The Original Fantasy Player Reference that Paul made is the closest thing that I have found.  It's strictly for Swords and Wizardry doesn't have art and it's not editable though.  Am i crazy, is this a pipe dream?  Is there some complication with the OGL that prevents this?  Or is there something like this already that I haven't found?

And one more thing:
In my last post I describe my preferred vision of orcs, and I've described orc shenaegans in the past.  They look something like this:

I was reminded about these guys by Needles fantastic post of 1d10 Deep Ones loot.  For me, orcs are less Peter Jackson and more H.P. Lovecraft and Roger Corman.

Orcs

Orcs are the simplest and most fundamental tool that evil gods and demons have to wreak their machinizations upon the World We Know. They enter the World We Know through the waters of brackish fens, dark pools under moonlight, or the sea. They can be found in the Shadow Realm as well, awaiting direction from their masters.

While goblins have pebbled skin which is often bright, striped and be-spiked like a lizzard, orcs are mottled, dark and smooth like an eel.

While goblins are maniacal inventors, orcs are patient builders, constructing monoliths and monuments.

While goblins often sing, orcs do not, though on moonless nights a low inhuman chanting may be heard coming from Orchenges.

Orcs are dutiful in the work they do for their masters, however, this work is merely vocational. The gods that orcs truly worship are much, much older and long since vanished from any world known to orcs or men.

Orcs are fascinated by human women.